One way that users can employ computing devices is to interact with collections of items. Collections can be displayed via a computing device to enable users to quickly view, navigate, and work with groups of related items such as a photo library, documents, tiles representing applications, icons, a media collection, and so forth. User interaction with a collection can cause a rearrangement of items within the collection that can be animated to help the user visualize changes made by the rearrangement.
One traditional animation approach involves directly showing travel of rearranged items along pathways (e.g., substantially straight lines) between starting positions and ending positions. Although this approach represents the actual physical movement of items, this kind of animation creates visual confusion as items overlap and/or slide across the collection. Moreover, a multitude of intermediate positions for each of the items must be specified to show travel along the pathways, which complicates development and presentation of rearrangements.